Women first competed at the Olympics in gymnastics at the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam, where the British women's team took the bronze – its best performance.

After the Second World War, the German and Swedish forms of gymnastics were combined. The 1960 Rome Olympics were the first to be televised, and this led to a greater interest in Britain of gymnastics. This Olympics had been dominated by Russian female gymnasts. In 1963 the Amateur Gymnastics Association became the British Amateur Gymnastics Association, and the BAGA first received a government grant, allowing it to pay coaches, and appoint a full-time national coach, Wray Stuart. He developed the BAGA Awards, a proficiency scheme for young gymnasts, which was adopted by seventy other countries.

The BAGA Awards started to produce results for Britain. Gymnastics was given superstar status by the 1972 Olympics at Munich.

BAGA was registered as a company on 20 April 1982. In 1979 the Sports Council had built a gym at Lilleshall, equipped to international standards in 1980, with the Queen Elizabeth Hall. In 1981 a £18,000 feasibility study looked at developing Lilleshall into a national centre, and in October 1982 the Sports Council allocated £1 million to develop a national centre.

Anne, Princess Royal opened the £1.75 million Princess Royal Hall at Lilleshall on 26 April 1988, paid for by the Sports Council. There is also the King George VI Hall and Ford Hall. Use of Lilleshall for gymnastics increased greatly throughout the late 1970s under Derek Tremayne. In 1997 BAGA became British Gymnastics.[1]

Its main publication is The Gymnast, having been published since 1959. Since 2011 it has been released in an online format only [3] Most news is now released via the British Gymnastics Website,[4] Social Media and the weekly Gymblast email newsletter[5]